Re: A few questions about linguistics concerning my new project

Hi Nick,
1. My lang, Omina, is also ergative. It translates passives like "x is hit"
using  a form which may be translated as "x is getting its hitting".
Thus "The bear is found" =
nuinarde guninadain hartu da
[for-the-getting][of its finding][bear][it-is]

2. Sometimes systems can get too unwieldy to keep track of! If you have a
large number of cases which are signed by inflection, you get heavy morpheme
stacking. Does morpheme a always come before morpheme b, and so on? When you
say 'inflections' I take it you mean prefixes/suffixes. Omina, which is
exclusively suffixing, has definite rules as to the ordering of suffixes, as
indeed does English, and many other real-world langs. Maybe you need some
balance. For instance, don't mark nouns for plural at all - that's a whole
family of inflections you've lost to begin with!

3. Rather than expand the vowel system, it might be fun to restrict it. Just
have (say) a i u, as I believe some Inuit langs do. That may even give your
language a certain cold-climate feel, fine if that's what you're after but
not so fine if you're not! You seem to have a thing for laterals. Maybe you
could introduce a lateral click; apologies if that's what /K\/ is - I
haven't yet downloaded a SAMPA chart. Maybe expand the rhotics as well.

Mike
----- Original Message -----
From: "Nick Scholten" <nick.scholten@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Monday, July 30, 2007 8:56 PM
Subject: A few questions about linguistics concerning my new project